Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2009 20:06:30 +0100
From: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
To: Andi Kleen <andi@firstfloor.org>
Cc: paul@mad-scientist.net, Oleg Nesterov <oleg@redhat.com>,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, stable@kernel.org,
       Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
       Andi Kleen <andi@firstfloor.org>, Roland McGrath <roland@redhat.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] coredump: Retry writes where appropriate
Message-ID: <20090601200630.6b18bcc1@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
In-Reply-To: <20090601190914.GV1065@one.firstfloor.org>
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On Mon, 1 Jun 2009 21:09:14 +0200
Andi Kleen <andi@firstfloor.org> wrote:

> On Mon, Jun 01, 2009 at 08:02:32PM +0100, Alan Cox wrote:
> > > If a program seems to be unresponsive the user could ^C, without
> > > realizing that it was really dumping core.  Now when they are asked to
> > > produce the core so the problem can be debugged, they can't do it.  Or,
> > 
> > and get their prompt back, which is probably why they are banging ^C. If
> > they didn't want their prompt back at that point they'd still be
> > wondering why nothing was occuring at the point it said (core dumped)
> 
> Maybe we need a background core dump?

You can pretty much implement that via the pipe handler if you care. Just
buffer aggressively.

For the general case however programs assume that when wait() returns
indicating the core dump occurred that they can immediately access the
dump (eg bug-buddy in Gnome)

Alan
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